‘Visible gestures’ : On urban landscape perspectives in planning

Abstract

In spite of the frequent use of landscape representations in planning, ‘the urban landscape’ is rarely the focus in discussions within planning practice or planning theory, be it in terms of representations or as a socio-material framework for planning actions. Instead it appears to be taken for granted and in this way affects planning theory and practice, leaving planning activities (professional as well as participatory) as rather haphazard events, hard to contextualize and to foresee any consequences of. Taking the landscape for granted excludes the possibility of discussing the differences between understanding the changing urban landscape from representations and understanding it in relation to experienced realities. This text argues for increased interdisciplinary elaborations on the meaning and content of urban landscape, by linking it to discourses in planning theory, urban theory and landscape theory.